The Writings of Don Havis

Thoughts on Religion, Education, And Uncertainty

By Don Havis, December 20, 1999

I was recently looking something up in a book that I bought in 1957. The book was The Devils Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. I wanted to be sure I had correctly quoted Mr. Bierce’s delightful definition of “faith.” I’ve always loved it. His definition, incidentally, is as follows: “Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.” I rank this definition “right up there” along side Mark Twain’s definition of the same word as, “Believing what you know ain’t so.”

In any event, while I was thumbing through Mr. Bierce’s wonderful book, a piece of paper fell out. In my own handwriting, and dated April 26, 1963 (my twenty-ninth birthday) I found a note—my thoughts on the word “education,” which Ambrose Bierce defined as “That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.” To this brilliant definition, I added the following thought. I call it “Havis’ Uncertainty Principle,”not to be confused with Heisenberg’s.*

“The degree to which one is educated is inversely related to the state of confidence one has in one’s beliefs, such that the well-educated individual is generally unsure of anything. The totally uneducated person, on the other hand, lives in a world of absolute certainty.”

In the manner in which one thought frequently leads to another, I began to think about what I have learned (or perhaps “unlearned”) in more recent years about the nature of religion, and how the above thought might relate to my hypothesized certainty/uncertainty continuum’s relationship to education. Some of these thoughts follow.

Since religions—especially the Christian religion—are based on only the flimsiest empirical evidence, if any at all; and since all religions have generally striven mightily against “science” and all efforts to educate the masses, the above maxim accounts, to a large degree, for its great success. That is, religion offers something that science can never offer—a world of certainty, a world where the adherent is saved from the difficult and often anxiety producing effort of thinking.

Stemming from the above, a further inducement which religion offers is a set of very pleasant, certain answers to life’s most challenging questions. Some of these questions and religion’s answers are as follows:

1. Life often seems unfair. I work hard, am kind to others and obey God’s rules, yet others seem to prosper more and have a better life than I do. Why?
   Answer: Life really is fair. It just seems unfair right now. You will receive your just reward in “heaven” or in your “next life.”
2. Why must I and the people I love die, often prematurely or without any sensible reason?
   Answer: You don’t really die. You, or some essence of you (your “soul”), will “live on” after death in some other realm. As for the incidences of early or apparently “senseless” death, you must simply believe that God wanted this person with him. Or, alternatively, if that explanation doesn’t satisfy, you have to accept the fact that “God works in mysterious ways,” which are not often clear to us ordinary mortals.
3. There are times when I just can’t seem to get what I want, or the obtaining of what I want requires an awful lot of effort. What can I do then?
   Answer: Pray. Sometimes you will receive what you want; that is, if you have been “good,” and have had enough faith. On those occasions when you have been good, faithful and have prayed hard, and you still didn’t get what you wanted, see “God works in mysterious ways,” above.

How can rationality compete with such answers? When one asks a well educated person—a person trained in evaluating objective evidence—for their best considered (albeit not certain) opinion as to the answers to the above questions, one receives answers such as the following:

1. Life not only seems unfair, it is in fact often actually unfair. Humans try to set up various judicial systems to attempt to approximate some degree of “fairness,” but because human beings are fallible, these systems often fail to do so.
2. People die because of various, mundane cause/effect reasons. Like other animals, their “parts” wear out from old age; they contract a fatal disease; they are in the “wrong place at the wrong time”; they get drunk and drive their car into a tree, etcetra. There is no one “up there” looking out for you, no supernatural father or mother to whom you can turn for help in times of need.
3. You can’t ever satisfy all of your needs, either “easily” or with great effort. There are ordinary, sensible reasons for this, such as: Circumstances were such that they simply could not be overcome, you didn’t try hard enough, others didn’t cooperate, etcetra. To imagine that there is some entity listening carefully to your wishes and occasionally and capriciously acting to fulfill some of them is simply absurd on the face of it.

Obviously the above last three “answers” are not nearly as emotionally satisfying as the first three answers offered by religion. In May of 1999, I attended the annual conference of the Council for Secular Humanism in Chicago. The theme and main question of this conference was, “Why Does Religion Persist?” To my mind the main reasons—there are others—for the persistence of religion seem to be fairly well summarized above.

*Werner Heisenberg, physicist. In 1927 he proposed his “uncertainty principle” which concerns accurately measuring both the velocity and the position of a particle.

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